Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  And for some time, at least, the Blairites had everything their way. Through good report and ill; through privatisation, war, and growing inequality; through the tumescence of a billionaire class, the NHS crisis caused by usurious Private Finance Initiatives, and the bankers’ pillage, there was barely a simmering reflex of revolt in the Labour Party. The new management ruled with a striking brittleness, defensiveness and paranoia, acting on the basis of a sort of organised distrust of the membership. They used enforcers like Margaret McDonagh to ensure that the leadership line was rarely up for debate, invoking ‘unwritten’ rules to blockade critical motions, or depending on loyal apparatchiks or trade union allies for diversion. The small remaining left-wing fringe was habitually derided as a coterie of ‘Trots’. Loyalists were parachuted into safe seats. When one inconvenient left-winger, Liz Davies, was selected by members as the parliamentary candidate for Leeds North East, Blair and his allies concocted a media smear campaign, and the NEC undemocratically blocked her selection. Those who departed from the loyalist fold over matters of conscience were ‘traitors’, as Tom Watson dubbed Emily Thornberry when she rejected the government’s authoritarian policy of ninety-day detention without trial. Despite their comprehensive triumph over the Left, the leadership clique couldn’t trust anyone. Davies, in her memoir of the haut-Blairite period, Through the Looking Glass, recalls the inability of the leadership to accept responsibility for failure: it was always blamed on ‘a lapse in presentation or a conspiracy’, or on ‘Labour Party members or Labour Party councillors’. Conference speeches, even those of delegates, were written by party staff, and critical delegates systematically prevented from speaking.2

  Whatever the Blairites lacked in persuasion, they made up for with brute power and with the unanswerable moral trump card: amid sustained economic growth, Labour was winning elections. You can’t argue with success and, for as long as this was the case, the Labour Right could couch their agenda in the language of technocracy: ‘what matters is what works’. Members voted with their feet, becoming inactive or resigning, while voters began to boycott the polls in unprecedented numbers. It was as if faced with the whole idea of fighting for a party that had become so symbiotically dependent upon the banks, business, the media, and the less liberal wings of the state, a party so crushingly dispiriting, so lacking in promise, millions simply gave up. The brief frisson of victory, the beautiful summer of 1997, when all that mattered was whether you were ‘up for Portillo’, seemed to have given way to a post-democratic melancholia and a defeat more insidious and disabling than any which Thatcher had inflicted. In 1997, all roads had led to the ‘free market’. By 2010, all roads led to austerity. Blyth Valley MP Ronnie Campbell suggested that the major difference between Labour and the Tories was that Labour would ‘cut your throat slowly’, while the Tories would ‘cut your head off’.3 Given such a choice, approximately 5 million voters – most of them working class – abandoned the party between 1997 and 2010, largely abstaining. Nothing, not even Ed Miliband’s neurotic charm, not even the frantic proliferation of new syntheses – ‘Blue Labour’, ‘One Nation Labour’, etc. – seemed able to reverse the decline.

  Given this dreary history, the understandable temptation among Corbyn’s most loyal supporters has been to accentuate the positive, while forgetting the underlying weaknesses that characterise the British Left. However, even in the afterglow of unexpected success, it is worth reflecting on the productive possibilities of defeat. The history of Labourism is, in a way, a dialectic of defeats. Labourism emerged from the setbacks of working-class politics in the nineteenth century, the failure of the ‘Lib–Lab’ alliance, and the legal impediments to industrial organisation. Corbyn, too, owes his position in a strange way to defeats. Had the British Left and the labour movement not been so comprehensively defeated by Thatcherism in the 1980s, it is more than likely that Blairism would have forced a radical-Left breakaway from the party, as happened to Continental social democracy – thus we would not be talking about a left-wing capture of the Labour leadership. Had the Blairites not been able to force through a series of party reforms reducing union influence, but also ultimately creating ‘one-member–one-vote’, Corbyn would not have been able to win just by getting the support of most voters. Had Labour not been defeated in 2010 and 2015, the necessary reappraisal of the limits and failures of its recent past would have been postponed, and the sources of degeneration might have continued until it was too late.

  Even now, there are many possible ways in which the Corbyn project could suffer setbacks and defeats. The question is what one does with them. To assimilate defeat is to learn the correct lessons from it. One reason why New Labour was able to thrive in the first instance is because the wrong lessons were drawn from past defeats. It was all too easy to focus on the failures of the hard Left – which were real – but the labour movement’s impasse was far more deeply structured by the dominant variations of Labourism, the main form that working-class politics had taken for most of the century.4 How much did the Labour Party foster or constrain the potential of the movements and social forces it sought to represent? How much did postwar social democracy contribute to their de-radicalisation? How might things have been different? While such questions were not exactly ignored, the force of the argument was usually directed against those who, for all their faults, were trying to take the Labour Party away from a repetition of the Wilson/Callaghan debacles. The point of revisiting this is that, in the event of further educational defeats, it is important that activists are not left demoralised, passive, bewildered, and burned out. Corbyn’s supporters need to position themselves where they can anticipate and act appropriately on the sources of those defeats.

  Jeremy Corbyn is in a strong position. As leader of the Labour Party, he has long enjoyed the support of the great majority of the party’s membership. After months of ‘Project Despair’, YouGov found that 66 per cent of the party’s members believed he was doing a good job, an increase on previous polls.5 The outcome of the chicken coup demonstrated that his support remained firm after a year. And, after a few months of aimlessness following Brexit, the election result has ensured that he now has the overwhelming goodwill of members for years to come. Labour’s share of popular support, having incrementally improved before May’s leadership, then fallen back drastically, is now ahead of that of the government and better than any position Labour has been in since before Iraq. The drumbeat of attacks from the backbenches has slowed down and become much more tentative and indirect, with Labour opponents hoping that, one way or another, Brexit will give them the opening they seek.

  Corbyn has constructed a shadow cabinet more in keeping with his predilections – something that some of his allies wish he’d done in the first place – and John McDonnell has crafted a series of economic policies with proven popular appeal. These include not just significant expansions of the social wage, but also a transformation of employment law, giving workers and unions more rights than they have had for decades. Labour is no longer compromised by offering a feeble triangulation on austerity – which, in its Osbornite version, is broken. Some of the party’s traditional bipartisanship on foreign policy has been rolled back. At least rhetorically, the party has rowed back from simply trying to offer its own, softer version of Tory migrant-baiting, although its post-Brexit retreat from free movement continues to be a sore spot for activists. Labour has proceeded from being an ineffectual opposition, to being an effectual one, to being a government-in-waiting. Corbyn has outstripped the prime minister in terms of approval ratings and fitness to govern, something that hasn’t happened to a Labour leader since 2008.

  Yet for all that, there remain potential sources of weakness. There is little sign that the media outlets and professionals who spent two years belittling Corbyn and his supporters now intend to radically change their ways. In a way, this could be an asset: the more they attack, the more his supporters rally to him. But it also means that they will be continually on the lookout for
fresh controversies, however trite. Their power has been shown to be diminished but, for at least some potential Labour voters, not gone. The majority of his supporters in the party have been passive throughout the period of leadership, and the active core has been racing to catch up, and somehow match the organisation, experience, visibility, and power that his opponents have. There is not yet any sign of the broad, popular social movements of the kind that Corbyn has argued a left-wing Labour Party needs, and it is a mistake to think that the party can be the social movement. Moreover, supposing Corbyn were to win an election any time soon, he would have to try and implement his programme while negotiating a solution to Brexit. He would have to persuade businesses to invest, financial corporations to stay put (as opposed, say, to moving to Paris, where Macron is planning a range of incentives to attract them), and a range of actors from state personnel to businessmen to make McDonnell’s plans for an upgrade of the productive base of the economy work. And he would have to persuade them to accept that a price of this is that workers will be paid more, and will have more rights, and corporations will pay more taxes.

  Not for the first time in recent years, the Left has been propelled to a position of influence well beyond its social and political strength, chiefly because of the etiolation of the old guard and the paucity of their analyses of – let alone solutions to – the crisis. But it is rare to catch the establishment with its pants down in this fashion, for so prolonged a period, and it does tend to recover. Neither ‘Project Fear’ nor ‘Project Despair’ has availed thus far, but if Corbyn and his allies were unable to use their strength to achieve lasting, hard-to-reverse gains, the opportunity would be lost and another chance would not be likely. So what would success look like?

  What Would It Mean for Jeremy Corbyn to Succeed?

  Before the 2017 general election, nothing raised the hackles of Labour’s ‘moderates’ more than the idea that they should be reduced to an oppositional rump, a party of activists and street protesters, exerting influence but wielding no power. Tony Blair famously declared that there were two types of culture in Labour: that of protest, and that of government:

  I’m the face on the placard. I’m that bastard, let’s get rid of him. The other culture is the guys holding the placard. They don’t really want to be in power, they want to make the people in power respond to their concerns.6

  This raises the question of what sort of power it is that they think they can wield. The history of Labour governments is not such that it inspires one with a sense of their awesome puissance. Rather, one tends to find a scenario much more consistent with Perry Anderson’s description,

  When a Labour Government is in office, it is an isolated, spotlit enclave, surrounded on almost every side by hostile territory, unceasingly shelled by industry, press, and orchestrated ‘public opinion’. Each time in the end it has been overrun.7

  Of course, no Labour government was as successful as New Labour in shaping public opinion, winning over the right-wing press barons, coalescing with industry, and turning hostile territory into terra familia. Even that government was not spared its crises, from the Iraq war to the NHS fiscal crisis to the credit crunch. But these were not the problems of trying to implement reforms from the Left, and by and large they did not incur the opposition of the powerful: they were the problems which arose from accepting the terrain inherited from one’s opponents. If this is what is meant by exercising power, the idea seems to have lost a significant part of its meaning.

  Yet, because it has been shown that conventional ways of gauging success are less important – headlines, news cycles, poll fluctuations, journalistic ideas about what makes ‘leadership’ – it would be easy to take refuge in wishful thinking, or in a set of common-sense defaults, without thinking it through. Corbyn’s project is in some respects a traditional electoral one, albeit not conducted in a traditional electoral terrain. It will be subject to some of the same logic and limitations of any such project. As such, we need a new way of thinking about success, and power.

  One way to define success, of course, is to contrast it with failure. The fundamental condition shaping everything that Corbyn does, or could conceivably do, is the germinal, complicated rebirth of the radical Left, and the concurrent persistence of many weaknesses of the Left and the labour movement. The recent reversal at the level of political organisation, with hundreds of thousands joining Labour to support a socialist leader, has been complemented by a flowering of radical media. Novara Media produces high-quality multimedia content, its personalities making regular, assured appearances on national broadcasters. A range of blogs like Another Angry Voice attract phenomenal readerships that at times, and with few resources, outperform the press. Left-wing social media accounts churn out a glut of daily content on Twitter and, more importantly, Facebook. Nonetheless, this is the dynamism of a movement in its fragile upswing, still developing, still maturing, still susceptible to being blindsided by developments. The relative paucity of social movements at this stage, combined with the ongoing decline in the trade union movement, where membership and strike rates are falling year-on-year, also place very high burdens of responsibility on those who are politically organised.

  From this perspective, there are several types of benchmark that could be used to think about success. The first is organisational. If Labour is, for the foreseeable future, the agency and vehicle of radical politics, what kind of party need it be? What needs to change so that it enables the creative capacities of members, rather than inhibiting and controlling them? How can the top-heavy distribution of power be changed, and structures democratised? How can the Left, and union members, build a lasting space in Labour, not just as cannon fodder but in the exercise of power? How much compromise with the traditional party management is necessary? How far can Corbyn’s supporters go in changing the party, given Corbyn’s dependence on the trade union leaderships? Corbyn himself has been reluctant to press for radical change too quickly, in order to avoid heightened conflict with MPs and councillors. And yet the truculent resistance of the party machinery, the jaw-droppingly cynical coup attempt, the suppression of party branches, the vindictive expulsions of members supposedly in breach of the party’s ‘aims and values’, the repeated attempts to sabotage the elected leader and bypass hundreds of thousands of members, must force a change. Particularly now that the election has electrified the party base. Here, a great deal will come down to the activist core organised under the rubric of Momentum.

  The second benchmark is ideological. Corbyn won the Labour leadership as a radical socialist, despite the fact that even in name, socialism had been off the agenda of mainstream politics for a couple of decades, if not longer. He immediately began reversing the decades-long trajectory to the right. He not only turned back austerity, but also promised to reverse many of the worst legacies of New Labour, such as tuition fees. There still seems to be broad acceptance of the argument that ‘cuts’ are necessary to reduce the deficit, which suggests that Labour hasn’t yet won all the political arguments about austerity, but it has certainly made a start. Unable to reverse party policy on Trident and NATO, Corbyn nonetheless demonstrated that being anti-nuclear and anti-war was not electoral death in this day and age. And while talking about a ‘fair’ post-Brexit ‘managed migration’ system going into the election, Corbyn made a laudable point of refusing to promise to reduce numbers and refuted attempts to blame migrants for social problems. Labour still communicates well with working-class audiences, and Corbyn has used that power to shift the balance of opinion and argument to the left, and change the agenda to one that no longer favours the Right. This is a long game: ideological territories are shaped over generations, not in time for electoral cycles. But the start already made is impressive.

  The third benchmark is electoral. Here, Labour’s inherited problems were not merely conjunctural but structural. Labour, by 2015, had not only suffered a customary problem with affluent swing voters, but also a more serious problem with working-
class voters. The risk was of Pasokification, as these core voters simply stopped turning out, or defected to anyone else offering something similar. This problem has deeper roots than New Labour, and a degree of class dealignment is visible in the votes for most European social-democratic parties, but the problem has radicalised in recent years. Corbyn recognised that a big part of Labour’s problem was low turnout among key, would-be-Labour-supporting demographics – young people and poor voters. Given the chance to campaign as he wanted to, he demonstrated against all received opinion that those voters could be mobilised. This doesn’t automatically mean that Labour is guaranteed to win the next election. There is a debate in Labour, including in Corbynite circles, over exactly what would be needed to get over the last hurdle.

  The final benchmark is policy. This is where Corbyn faces his most difficult test. Of course, the policy lines he develops are necessarily a compromise between the trade union leaderships, the parliamentary party, the party machinery, and the membership. But thus far, the record shows that he has been able to push policy on most issues quite far to the left of where it was. Party colleagues, despite their palpable hostility to him, have mostly wholeheartedly accepted the new anti-austerity politics.8 They have also largely accepted his direction on more difficult issues like the bombing of Syria, or the triggering of Article 50. The red lines appear to be on issues related to the global power of the British state, its orientation toward militarism, and the alliance with the US – but even these are likely to come into question in the era of Washington’s decline. But while Corbyn has secured his party’s support for a radical agenda, and has secured a critical mass of public support for it too, the vital question remains whether or not the policy mix would work on its own terms, enough to force the opposition to adapt to it as the new reality, and sustain a prolonged period in government for Labour.